On November 27th 2017, scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), announced in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), that they have successfully created robotic muscles made from metal or plastic skeletons. The muscles, which are covered in liquid or air and then sealed in plastic or fabric, can lift up to a thousand times their own weight.
The new flexible robots use a folding origami structure combined with the use of a vacuum. Each muscle is filled with either air or fluid that is manipulated with an electric pump. In this way the structures can be expanded or contracted. They can move according to their shape and can grip, twist, and lift, just like the real muscles of a human arm. Professor Robert J. Wood of Harvard says the actuators are scalable and can be made in sizes from a few milometers up to a meter.
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